Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Toyota's mission in life isn't just making wildly popular sedans for
the masses. Another division, Toyota Motorsports, exists to build fast
cars. Toyota announced today they just set a record lap time on the
Nürburgring Nordschleife for an electric vehicle.

The Nürburgring (or Nürburg Ring) is a famous race track in Germany
built around the village of Nürburg. The Nordschleife ("Northern Loop")
at the track is frequently used for testing, and that's what Toyota has
done with their purpose-built electric race car.

Their new electric car
lap record of 7 mins 47.794 secs beat the previous record, 9 mins 1.338
secs, by a large margin. The track is 20.8 kilometers (12.92 miles),
which makes the lap time roughly equate to 100 miles/hr averaged over
the course.

The car, the EV P001, is based on a chassis from Radical, a boutique
sports-car chassis manufacturer in Britain. The drive train has two EVO
Electric motors, and was integrated into a working vehicle by Rational
Motion, a powertrain development consultancy. Toyota claims the car has
a 160 miles/hr top speed and the two motors working together produce
800 Nm torque.

Toyota had several goals in mind. One was to go faster than an 8
minute lap, thereby convincingly breaking the lap record. They also
wanted to learn more about their powertrain, especially in extreme
conditions. They see this as having demonstrated the TMG electric drive
train as "ideal to power any future single-make electric motorsport
series," and they intend to begin selling drive trains in 2012. They
are continuing to research and develop electric motorsport vehicle
capacity, and are exploring alternative chassis.

There are several ongoing efforts to develop electric car racing
series in addition to the electric motorcycle racing going on inside the
TTXGP and e-Power series. TMG would appear to have their eyes on
participating in electric car racing.

TMG has posted pictures of the EV P001 on their flikr account (see link below) and a video on youtube.